Research Fellow at the University of Milan. Scholar in African Studies, specialized in the history and in the political systems of contemporary Africa, he works in and on the Sahel since 2014. At the centre of his research is the entanglement between the history of violence in the Sahel-Sahara, political ecology and land- and water-based conflicts.

Full professor of geography at the University of Padua. Sahelian region is the place of direct confrontation with territorial processes, linked to water seen both as a common resource and as the basis for the modernization of agriculture.

Curator of the Museum of Geography of the University of Padua. For the project she is exploring the cartographic collections of the museum to reconstruct the image of Africa, and of the Sahel in particular, developed in Europe from the end of the fifteenth century.